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Content type: Long Read
In January 2017, Kenya’s information and communication technology regulator, the Communications Authority of Kenya, announced that it was spending over 2 billion shillings (around 14 million USD) on new initiatives to monitor Kenyans’ communications and regulate their communications devices. The press lit up with claims of spying, and members of Kenya’s ICT community vowed to reject the initiatives as violating Kenyans’ constitutional rights, including the right to privacy (Article 31…
Content type: News & Analysis
The Privacy International Network recently submitted joint stakeholder reports for seven partner countries - India, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia - as part of the 27th session of the Universal Periodic Review (1 to 12 May 2017).
Communications surveillance was a major area of concern, as we observed that these policies and practices remain largely opaque, complex and vague. In…
Content type: Advocacy
On 28 June 2017, Privacy International sent a letter and briefing to the Mexican government following reports indicating that Mexican authorities had used NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to target journalists and human rights defenders working to expose government corruption and human rights abuses. NSO Group is a surveillance technology company that sells products and services, including malware, exclusively to government clients.
These attacks were designed to compromise the mobile phones of…
Content type: Advocacy
This stakeholder report is a submission by Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) and Privacy International (PI). The Asociación por los Derechos Civiles (ADC) is a non-governmental, non-pro t organisation based in Buenos Aires that promotes civil and social rights in Argentina and other Latin American countries. It was founded in 1995 with the purpose of helping to strengthen a legal and institutional culture that guarantees the fundamental rights of the people, based on respect…
Content type: Advocacy
This stakeholder report is a submission by Privacy International (PI). PI is a human rights organisation that works to advance and promote the right to privacy and government surveillance around the world. Privacy International wishes to bring concerns about the protection and promotion of the right to privacy for consideration in Pakistan’s upcoming review at the 28th session of the Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review.
Content type: Press release
Please find attached a copy of the briefing along with promotional photographs with the briefing.
Privacy International has today sent top EU and UK Brexit negotiators* a briefing on their vulnerability to potential surveillance by each other, and others. Brexit negotiations are to begin today.
The global privacy rights NGO has highlighted to the negotiators the risk of sophisticated surveillance capabilities being deployed against each other and by others, and provided…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International welcomes this opportunity to engage in a dialogue over the implementation of the UN Security Council Resolution 2322 (2016), specifically as they related to intelligence sharing and mutual legal assistance mechanisms to access cross-border data.
Content type: Examples
French spy agency Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure in December 2016 for 10 million euros signed a contract buying access to Palantir’s Gotham software. French politicians have voiced concerns over the software as France pushes to become more technologically independent.
Publication: EU Observer
Date: 9 June 2017
Content type: News & Analysis
The past few years have seen a huge rise in the number of attacks both active and passive, against organisations big and small. Attacks against organisations happen for a multitude of reasons: extortion via "ransomware", exfiltration of commercial secrets, or just "the lulz". While this can be crippling to a commercial business, it can potentially be devastating to an NGO, especially those which work to hold powerful institutions to account. The types of information held by such NGOs could…
Content type: News & Analysis
Image source: AFP
Earlier this month, the Kenyan daily The Star reported that UK-based data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had been quietly contracted by President Uhuru Kenyatta’s party in a bid to win himself a second term in office. State House officials were quick to deny the claims, while the company itself issued no comment.
Cambridge Analytica has exploded onto the scene following revelations that its psychometric profiling techniques were used and reportedly played a role in…
Content type: Advocacy
Earlier this month, it was reported that UK-based data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had been quietly contracted by President Uhuru Kenyatta’s party in a bid to win a second term in office. Privacy International has written to Cambridge Analytica to learn more about how the company assessed the risk of its work in Kenya and how it will ensure that Kenyans’ personal data will be protected.
Content type: News & Analysis
Dear Minister Dr. Wolfgang Brandstetter, Minister Mag. Wolfgang Sobotka, Minister Dr.in Pamela Rendi-Wagner, MSs, Minister Mag. Hans Peter Doskozil,
Privacy International is a United Kingdom-based non-governmental organization, which is dedicated to protecting the right to privacy around the world. Privacy International is committed to ensuring that government surveillance complies with the rule of law and the international human rights framework. As part of this commitment, Privacy…
Content type: News & Analysis
This guest piece was written by Leandro Ucciferri of the Association for Civil Rights (Asociación por los Derechos Civiles). It does not necessarily reflect the views or position of Privacy International.
We look at our smartphone first thing in the morning to check the weather, and our to-do list for the day. During breakfast, we read the news and learn about what is going on in the rest of the world. In our commute to work or college, we scroll through our social media feeds…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International welcomes the willingness of the UK government to implement the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which provides stronger standards of protection of personal data to those contained in the EU Directive 1995, whose provisions were implemented in the Data Protection Act 1998. Improved rights and enforcement measures will generate greater trust and therefore greater engagement in the digital environment, which will in turn benefit the economy. …
Content type: Long Read
This piece was originally published in Lawfare in May 2017.
This post is part of a series written by participants of a conference at Georgia Tech in Surveillance, Privacy, and Data Across Borders: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives.
Cross-border law enforcement demands have become increasingly important to law enforcement in the digital age. Digital evidence in one jurisdiction—such as the United States—is often necessary to investigate a crime that has effects in another jurisdiction…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International generally opposes hacking as a tool for surveillance. While the DDL Orlando is an opportunity to fill the current legislative gap in the use of hacking for investigative purposes, PI believes that it falls short of the requirements of existing international human rights law.
Content type: News & Analysis
Why would we ever let anyone hack anything, ever? Why are hacking tools that can patently be used for harm considered helpful? Let's try to address this in eight distinct points:
1) Ethical hacking is a counter proof to corporate claims of security.
Companies make products and claim they are secure, or privacy preserving. An ethical hack shows they are not. Ethical hackers produce counter-proofs to government or corporate claims of security, and thus defend us, piece by tiny…
Content type: News & Analysis
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
The financial services industry is eager to gather more and more data about our lives. Apart from mining the data they have historically collected such as credit history, they are looking to use our social media profiles to reach into our friendships and social interactions. They are using these data in new and unexpected ways, including personality profiling to determine the risk of lending to you, and thus the price you will pay.
Firstcarquote, a…
Content type: News & Analysis
Dear Politicians,
With elections coming up and quite a few cringe-worthy comments that have come from many of you and from all sides of the political spectrum, we figured it was time to have a chat about encryption.
First, let’s say what you shouldn’t do:
call for boycotts of companies because they protect their users’ data even from the companies themselves.
say something like “we’ll develop a Manhattan-level project on this” (which, as we’ll remind you, ended up with the creation of a…
Content type: Long Read
Disclaimer: This piece was written in April 2017. Since publishing, further information has come out about Cambridge Analytica and the company's involvement in elections.
Recently, the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica has been the centre of tons of debate around the use of profiling and micro-targeting in political elections. We’ve written this analysis to explain what it all means, and the consequences of becoming predictable to companies and political campaigns.
What does…
Content type: Advocacy
Update
Subsequent to our letter of January 2017 to the Italian export authorities expressing our belief that the export of an internet network surveillance system to Egypt poses a clear risk to human rights, the Ministry of Economic Development has confirmed in a press release that the authorisation has been revoked.
While the decision is to be welcomed, a feature documentary broadcast yesterday on Al-Jazeera shows the severity of the surveillance industry’s threat to privacy and…
Content type: News & Analysis
This week the United States Congress voted to strip away one of the country’s few safeguards of the right to privacy by repealing rules which would have limited internet service provider’s ability to use or share customers’ data without customers’ approval.
Meanwhile, last week, 6,500 kilometers away in Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council called on states to strengthen customers’ control over their data and develop legislation to address harm from the sale or corporate sharing of…
Content type: News & Analysis
For as long as automobiles have been around, manufacturers have been trying to find ways of putting more technology inside of cars, oftentimes sold as value-added services for their customers, whether that be 8-tracks of the 1960s and 1970s, the enhancement to security of central locking of the 1980s and 1990s, or the introduction of satellite navigation in the 2000s.
Today, as our technologies become ‘smarter’, so do the risks to our personal privacy. This especially true as society is on the…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International's submission on the right to privacy in Thailand, Human Rights Committee, 119th Session.
In our assessment to the Committee, national legislation governing surveillance is inadequate, unclear as to the powers, scope and capacity of state surveillance activities and thus it falls short of the required human rights standards to safeguard individuals from unlawful interference to the right to privacy.
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International and the Italian Coalition for Civil Liberties' Joint Submission in Consideration of the Sixth Periodic Report of Italy Human Rights Committee 119th Session (6-29 March 2017).
The submission brings to the attention of the Committee the ongoing concern with Italian security agencies’ hacking capabilities and intelligence sharing arrangement, with Italian data retention procedures, and its export control regime as it relates to its robust…
Content type: News & Analysis
On a hot day in Nairobi, our researcher is speaking to an officer of Kenya’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). The afternoon is wearing on and the conversation has turned to the presidential elections, taking place in August this year. He has just finished describing the NIS’ highly secret surveillance powers and the disturbing ways in which these powers are deployed.
“It is what you might call ‘acceptable deaths,’” he states about the misuse of communications surveillance powers. “People…
Content type: Report
This investigation focuses on the techniques, tools and culture of Kenyan police and intelligence agencies’ communications surveillance practices. It focuses primarily on the use of surveillance for counterterrorism operations. It contrasts the fiction and reality of how communications content and data is intercepted and how communications data is fed into the cycle of arrests, torture and disappearances.
Communications surveillance is being carried out by Kenyan state actors, essentially…